‘I’m not the one going into the streets with stones and Kalashnikovs’: Charlie Hebdo editor rejects responsibility for violence over naked Mohammad cartoons

The editor of French magazine Charlie Hebdo has said that when his magazine ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday by portraying him naked in cartoons, he and his organization were not responsible for fuelling the anger of Muslims around the world who are already incensed by a video depicting him as a lecherous fool.

The editor, Stephane Charbonnier, also known as Charb, rejected criticism. “We have the impression that it’s officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists,” he said.

“It shows the climate. Everyone is driven by fear, and that is exactly what this small handful of extremists who do not represent anyone want: to make everyone afraid, to shut us all in a cave,” he told Reuters.

“Muhammad isn’t sacred to me,” he said in an interview at the weekly’s offices on the northeast edge of Paris. “I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law; I don’t live under Koranic law.”

Charbonnier said he had no regrets and felt no responsibility for any violence.

“I’m not the one going into the streets with stones and Kalashnikovs,” he said. “We’ve had 1,000 issues and only three problems, all after front pages about radical Islam.”

One cartoon alluded to the scandal over a French magazine’s publication of topless photos of the wife of Britain’s Prince William. It showed a bare female torso topped by a beard with the caption “Riots in Arab countries after photos of Mrs Mohammad are published”.

The drawings risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Riot police were deployed to protect the paper’s Paris offices after it hit news stands.

It featured several caricatures of the Prophet showing him naked in what the publishers said was an attempt to poke fun at the furore over the film. One, entitled “Mohammad: a star is born,” depicted a bearded figure crouching over to display his buttocks and genitals.

The French government, which had urged the weekly not to print the cartoons, said it was shutting embassies and schools in 20 countries as a precaution on Friday, when protests sometimes break out after Muslim prayers.

Charlie Hebdo is no stranger to controversy. Its Paris offices were firebombed last November after it published a mocking caricature of Mohammad, and Charbonnier has been under police guard ever since.

Speaking outside his offices in an eastern neighbourhood with many residents of North African origin, Charbonnier said he had not received any threats over the latest cartoons. In a message on its Twitter account, Charlie Hebdo said its website had been hacked, but referred readers to a blog it also uses.

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